


it's peaceful in the deep

by HearJessRoar



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018) Season 5 Spoilers, schmoop yall want some schmoop?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:42:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24464380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HearJessRoar/pseuds/HearJessRoar
Summary: Being used as a cosmic plaything by an evil overlord apparently took a serious mental toll and also left you unable to sleep like a normal person, who would have guessed?Definitely not Mermista, she just wanted a warmer shirt.(that's what she's gonna claim in the morning.)
Relationships: Mermista/Sea Hawk (She-Ra)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 249





	it's peaceful in the deep

_sickly green tinted across everything unmitigated rage bask in the light of horde prime submit no please please not them not him please no. no DON'T-_

Mermista bolts upright with a gasp.

Echoes of screams shrill in her ears as she pants, trying desperately to catch her breath. Cold sweat has slicked her hair to her forehead and she shivers in the night air.

It's never completely dark in Bright Moon. It's never completely dark anywhere on Etheria now. Pale starlight pours in from her window. It rinses the guest room with cool, purifying grayness, and for a moment, Mermista almost feels calm.

_pain pain searing her nerves everything is green everything hurts_

Never mind.

She kicks off the covers twisted around her legs. They fall to the floor with a muffled thump, and Mermista wraps her arms around her shins. Breathing as deeply as she can through the phantom pain, she buries her face in her knees, shaking.

Catra had said that they would be fine after being chipped, and as far she knew, physically she was.

But that didn't stop the flashes of what she had done from haunting her at night.

There's a little circle of healing scabs on the back of her neck where that _thing_ infected her. She knows that Catra and Scorpia and Spinnerella have matching wounds, along with several hundreds of Etherian citizens. They mark her as a victim of Horde Prime's violence, of being used like some sort of demented doll to do his bidding.

She touches the spot and winces. It doesn't hurt, not really. But the memory of something attaching itself to her, something _wrong_ and _other_ , makes her skin crawl.

The bed is fluffy and soft and it was very kind of Glimmer to let all of them crash in her castle since most of their homes are either too far away or (in her case) reduced to smouldering rubble over a year ago. But it's too big and too empty and has the semi-hostile vibes of a guest room and in the looming darkness of the half-light the walls feel like they're too far away.

It’s weird to think that she got used to living in a tent, but she did. There was comfort in knowing that someone was only a few feet away at any given time, someone in the same situation who understood. Now, castles seem like a lonely opulence.

She can't stand it any longer and lurches out of bed unsteadily. As she gets her balance, she wishes that she'd worn something warmer to sleep; a pair of shorts and a tank top had seemed like a good idea when the hot burn of the sun was still heavy in the night air.

Mermista doesn't own very many articles of clothing that have sleeves; Salineas was almost always warm, and she was used to the clinical coldness of the ocean on her skin.

But this was a bone deep chill that left her toes and fingers aching, and she doesn't have anything handy that's comfortable enough to sleep in.

Glimmer had gifted her a pair of fuzzy socks a few days earlier though, and Mermista kneels to fish them out from under the chair where she'd tossed them. At the time she had scoffed, and claimed them to not be her style. Now, Mermista would do anything to get warm.

She pulls the soft teal fabric over her feet, feeling marginally better, but not enough to make her get back into bed.

She wants a long sleeved shirt.

She doesn't have one.

But she knows who does.

If she were amongst their friends, Mermista would groan theatrically and act like what she's about to do is torture. But she's alone and cold and admittedly very shaken by the ghosts of memories rattling their chains in her head, so she doesn't even hesitate to knock on Sea Hawk's door.

Glimmer had given them rooms next to each other, and it kind of made her want to die that she was so transparent to apparently _everyone_ , but whatever.

There's no answer from inside, which means he isn't awake, which also means he isn't doing anything that would be embarrassing to walk in on, so she turns the knob and lets herself into his room.

It's practically a mirror of her own, down to the odd little bottles that line the shelves above the vanity. Mermista had checked hers a long while ago and they were empty. Who ever heard of decorative bottles? Bright Moon was weird, honestly.

He's sprawled out across the bed, nearly buried in all the blankets. Sea Hawk makes funny little snuffling noises as he sleeps, and Mermista lets out a breath she didn't remember holding in the first place.

She creeps on light feet to the chair where he's been throwing all his clothing, clean things on the chair itself and dirty on the floor around it, and tries to pick through it in the dark. She knows for a fact that his soft gray shirt just came back from the laundry yesterday, because it had gotten mixed up with Bow's things, and Bow had sent it with her to give it back.

She finds it by the sleeve and _pulls_ , causing all the clothes piled on the chair to shift.

In hindsight, not the brightest thing she has ever done.

Sea Hawk grumbles something incoherent and rolls over.

Mermista freezes, the shirt dangling from her hand, as the pile collapses and falls to the floor.

It's not loud as far as falling items go, but she can sense the moment Sea Hawk wakes up.

"Mermista?"

Crap.

She contemplates staying very still and letting him think his eyes are playing tricks on him and that he has imagined her attempt at late night petty theft.

But then he asks, voice rough with sleep and soft with affection, "Mermista, what's wrong?"

And Mermista _breaks_ because she keeps seeing _green green green_ flash every time she closes her eyes and she is _tired_ , okay?

She clutches the shirt to her chest, balled up in her fists as she studies the floor beneath her feet. She hears him roll out of bed and approach her slowly, like she’s a wounded animal that he doesn’t want to spook.

When his hands reach out for her shoulders, Mermista doesn’t jump, but she grips the shirt tighter like a lifeline. “I didn’t mean to wake you up,” she mutters. “I was just cold.”

Sea Hawk sees right through her, because _of course_ he does. His hands run comfortingly up and down her arms, once, twice, three times before he lets go. Mermista looks up at him.

He's quite a sight, sleep rumpled and barefoot. His hair is an undignified disarray, his mustache looks askew, and there's lines from his pillow pressed into his cheekbone. He has also decided on a tank top and shorts for sleepwear, though the shirt he has chosen says "ARSONIST" across the chest. In any other circumstance, she would find the shirt hilarious. Briefly, she wonders if it was Glimmer's doing.

Probably.

The whole thing makes him suddenly look so much younger and Mermista is forcibly reminded of a simpler time. Before she'd inherited a broken kingdom.

They'd been just kids back then.

She feels like a kid again now; a sad, scared, cold little kid. And Mermista can lie to herself all she wants, but deep down she knows exactly why she snuck in here and it wasn't for the shirt.

So she leans in and Sea Hawk catches her with a stumble as she wraps her arms around his waist and buries her face in the place where his neck meets his shoulder. The stolen shirt drops from her grasp behind him and she heaves a shuddering, unsteady breath. He holds her, doesn’t ask her again.

_broken screaming throat raw bleeding water everywhere lurid green bow to your savior kill them all_

Sea Hawk is humming into her hair as she comes back to reality, some old Salineas song about a siren and a sailor that she recognizes from her childhood.

 _God_ that is corny.

She wants so very badly to tell him so, but her heart is still pounding and he's still holding her and as much as she hates to admit it, Sea Hawk does have a good singing voice when he isn't half howling some stupid shanty and it's _nice._

Mermista doesn't know what power makes her ask if she can stay. Her cheeks are on fire and she can't look at him, but for once in his life, Sea Hawk doesn't make a big deal out of something.

Instead he offers to sleep on top of the covers if she just doesn't want to be alone.

He isn't ruining it, and that freaks her out more than anything else.

"No."

Her mouth just has a mind of its own tonight. But whatever, honestly.

_Whatever._

Because Sea Hawk knows her and he still likes her and even if she wanted to be cantankerous and grumpy at him right now, she couldn't because it takes so much energy to be aloof and she hasn't slept properly in three days. 

So Mermista is going to be as clingy as she wants and if Sea Hawk tells anyone (he won't) then she can deal with it later.

Besides, she's the only one who knows he's a little spoon and she's pretty sure he wants her to keep that information to herself.

It’s not about stopping the nightmares, because as great as Sea Hawk is, he can’t heal several weeks’ worth of mental trauma. It’s about the fact that she is inevitably going to wake up screaming again, and she wants someone who cares to be next to her when it happens. Sea Hawk conveniently just happens to care about her more than practically anyone else on the planet.

And that’s enough. It has to be.

**Author's Note:**

> listen i know that it's sappy af but i am projecting my own old injury pain and it's my fic so i get to choose the coping mechanism. 
> 
> you cant yell at me im on so many painkillers rn im untouchable 
> 
> when catra's chip got deactivated in a not very nice way, she got these super great (horrible) flashes afterwards even after it was removed. i theorize that when mermista got hit in the chip and knocked out, it maybe left her with some nasty aftereffects just like catra
> 
> anyway mermista is soft when it's just her and sea hawk come and tear this headcanon from my cold dead hands


End file.
